Chapter 2i

Chapter 2I A Section in My Biography

IN due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged.I dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting,intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements.Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed--and hoped--that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and dieat the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came,commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone.

I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver minerin Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner,in California; next, a reporter in San Francisco; next, a specialcorrespondent in the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondentin Europe and the East; next, an instructional torch-bearer onthe lecture platform; and, finally, I became a scribbler of books,and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England.

In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-driftingyears that have come and gone since I last looked from the windowsof a pilot-house.